From scanning items at checkout line to overnight sensation, Alex, a good-looking Target employee (or so the internet thought), took the social media world by storm when a seemingly candid photo of him busy at work made the rounds and turned him into a meme superstar.

But the whole story, as it turned out, was a publicity stunt by a new Tech startup. Breakr, that claims to have set up the whole thing to get the #alexfromtarget hashtag to go viral, calling it one of the "most amazing social media experiments ever."

Alex, a teen who seemingly worked at Target, had a picture uploaded by a Twitter user at 12:05 p.m. on Nov. 2. From there, the image took on a life of its own, being shared, reposted, edited, and liked by thousands of his newfound fans all over the interwebs.

On the evening of the same day, Twitter user @DGM_Alex, who seemed to be the Alex from Target the internet was all the rage about, tweeted the question, "Am i famous now? [sic]"

His followers on Twitter ballooned from 2,000 to 340,000 in just a few hours.

Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, CEO and Founder at Breakr, the firm responsible for the viral sensation, then posted the announcement on LinkedIn that it was all part of the company's social experiment to see how a specific, often dismissed, demographic - fangirls - have the power to shape and influence the internet.

"[I]f you can earn the love and respect from a global community such as the 'Fangirl' demographic - you can rally them together to drive awareness for any cause even if it's to take a random kid from unknown to stardom overnight," he said in his post.

Indeed, according to reports on the social experiment, the power of the fangirl demographic has the ability for far-reaching, memorable, influence on social media. Without really doing anything, a good-looking kid from target became an internet celebrity simply by tweeting and appealing to the fangirl demographic, who were tickled in the right way to make Alex from Target a bona fide internet trend.

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